CULIAR SYSTEM OF MARRIAGE--NUMBER
OF POPULATION--UNIFORMITY--EMBALMING--PLACES OF SEPULTURE--FUNERAL
OBSEQUIES AT NUKUHEVA-NUMBER OF INHABITANTS IN TYPEE--LOCATION OF THE
DWELLINGS--HAPPINESS ENJOYED IN THE VALLEY--A WARNING--SOME IDEAS WITH
REGARD TO THE PRESENT STATE OF THE HAWAIIANS--STORY OF A MISSIONARY'S
WIFE--FASHIONABLE EQUIPAGES AT OAHU--REFLECTIONS

KING MEHEVI!--A goodly sounding title--and why should I not bestow
it upon the foremost man in the valley of Typee? The republican
missionaries of Oahu cause to be gazetted in the Court Journal,
published at Honolulu, the most trivial movement of 'his gracious
majesty' King Kammehammaha III, and 'their highnesses the princes of the
blood royal'.* And who is his 'gracious majesty', and what the
quality of this blood royal'?--His 'gracious majesty' is a fat, lazy,
negro-looking blockhead, with as little character as power. He has
lost the noble traits of the barbarian, without acquiring the redeeming
graces of a civilized being; and, although a member of the Hawiian
Temperance Society, is a most inveterate dram-drinker.

*Accounts like these are sometimes copied into English and American
journals. They lead the reader to infer that the arts and customs of
civilized life are rapidly refining the natives of the Sandwich Islands.
But let no one be deceived by these accounts. The chiefs swagger about
in gold lace and broadcloth, while the great mass of the common people
are nearly as primitive in their appearance as in the days of Cook. In
the progress of events at these islands, the two classes are receding
from each other; the chiefs are daily becoming more luxurious and
extravagant in their style of living, and the common people more and
more destitute of the necessaries and decencies of life. But the end
to which both will arrive at last will be the same: the one are fast
destroying themselves by sensual indulgences, and the other are
fast being destroyed by a complication of disorders, and the want of
wholesome food. The resources of the domineering chiefs are wrung from
the starving serfs, and every additional bauble with which they bedeck
themselves is purchased by the sufferings of their bondsmen; so that the
measure of gew-gaw refinement attained by the chiefs is only an index
to the actual state in which the greater portion of the population lie
grovelling.

The 'blood royal' is an extremely thick, depraved fluid; formed
principally of raw fish, bad bran